January 10, 2014 Look Fear and Loathing in Wonderland By Dan Piepenbring From Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Ralph Steadman, 1973. Via Brain Pickings. Ralph Steadman’s febrile and slightly sinister take on Alice in Wonderland, published in 1973 and exhumed today by Brain Pickings, will make you think twice before using the phrase “Cheshire Cat grin.”
January 10, 2014 On the Shelf Comedies Are Too Depressing, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Chuchin the Clown, via Wikimedia Commons Are today’s most prestigious “comedies” too depressing? The Los Angeles Public Library is soon to offer high school diplomas. (You can’t just check them out for a few weeks; you have to work for them.) More on the curious connection between prose and booze: “Writers in this office used to drink,” said an unnamed New Yorker fixture. For the discriminating digital reader on a budget, a treasure trove of public domain e-books.
January 9, 2014 In Memoriam Tooting on His Sideways Horn By Dan Piepenbring Photo: T. Carrigan, via Flickr Amiri Baraka died today, at seventy-nine; The Paris Review had the pleasure of publishing several of his poems. Baraka wrote “Pres Spoke a Language” to celebrate the jazz saxophonist Lester Young, but one could just as easily apply its eulogy to the poet himself: Preshad a languageand a life, like,all his own,but in the teeming whole of us he livedtooting on his sideways horn Read “Pres Spoke a Language” here.
January 9, 2014 On Travel The Paris Review Reviews Paris By Dan Piepenbring We looked into it. Exactly 365 days ago, the poet Patricia Lockwood asked: Rightfully, her query went on to enjoy more than a thousand retweets, landing on several best-of-2013 lists, and earning plaudits from all over—because it’s a really good question. We were confounded. Despite our name and the dozens of interviews we’ve conducted in Paris, we had never really thought to assess the city’s quality. We put our top people on it. For the next 365 days, our agents combed the twenty arrondissements, an army of flaneurs with clipboards in hand, golf pencils tucked behind their ears. They took water samples, soil samples, croissant samples. Equipped with measuring tapes, Geiger counters, and elegant cravats, they scrutinized the city’s every boulevard and metro station. They assessed the turbidity of the Seine; they carbon dated paintings, supped on the finest Bordeaux, and enjoyed the haute fare of Le Chateaubriand, Septime, and Benoit. They sent up weather balloons and infiltrated the fashion houses. They noted the Royale with Cheese. From Gentilly to Saint-Ouen, no stone was left unturned, no bichon frise unnuzzled. Then, having conducted such exhaustive research, they crunched the numbers, feeding the data into a series of world-class supercomputers with processing speeds in excess of thirty-three quadrillion floating-point operations per second. At last, they furnished a verdict: It’s pretty good! Case closed.
January 9, 2014 Arts & Culture, Our Daily Correspondent Beautiful Hide By Sadie Stein Jane Powell and Howard Keel in a poster for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Not that long ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn street and encountered an elderly woman surrounded by grocery bags. I offered to help carry them into her apartment, and I was sort of disappointed when she said yes and I saw what a long staircase it was and how heavy the bags were. After several trips we’d gotten them all in and she thanked me. “I was worried I was going to miss the beginning of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers on TV,” she explained. “It’s my favorite movie.” “You know,” I said, “it’s out on DVD now. I’d be glad to loan it to you.” “Oh, I have the DVD,” she said blithely. The film inspires such irrational devotion. Whenever I am down, I go to YouTube and watch the barn-dance scene, which is famous not just because of the number of accomplished dancers in the cast but also because of the sheer, exhausting athleticism of Michael Kidd’s choreography. As a child, I decided that my wedding party would replicate the entire number—I was going to be Milly and do the pas de deux in the middle—but then you grow up and realize that unless you are a dictator on an international scale, this kind of thing is impossible. Nevertheless, I defy anyone to watch it and not get just a little bit cheered up. Read More
January 9, 2014 Quote Unquote Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today By Dan Piepenbring Simone de Beauvoir arriving in Israel with Jean-Paul Sartre, 1967. Photo: Milner Moshe, via Wikimedia Commons. INTERVIEWER Some critics and readers have felt that you spoke about old age in an unpleasant way. DE BEAUVOIR A lot of people didn’t like what I said because they want to believe that all periods of life are delightful, that children are innocent, that all newlyweds are happy, that all old people are serene. I’ve rebelled against such notions all my life, and there’s no doubt about the fact that the moment, which for me is not old age but the beginning of old age, represents—even if one has all the resources one wants, affection, work to be done—represents a change in one’s existence, a change that is manifested by the loss of a great number of things. If one isn’t sorry to lose them it’s because one didn’t love them. I think that people who glorify old age or death too readily are people who really don’t love life. Of course, in present-day France you have to say that everything’s fine, that everything’s lovely, including death. —Simone de Beauvoir, the Art of Fiction No. 35